I’m back, I guess.

That was seventeen years ago, which is kind of frightening, but that’s how it is. I grew up reading Discworld and I’m still a fan. This Summer, I’m going to be re-reading the whole series, from The Colour of Magic through Making Money. Or possibly Unseen Academicals, which is due out in October. Pratchett’s one of the few authors whose books I automatically pick up as soon as they’re released. He’s the only author whose books I’ll buy in hardcover. So don’t expect the utmost objectivity with these reviews.

Then again, I can see the flaws in The Colour of Magic. This first book of the series follows the adventures of Rincewind, a hapless wizard, as he tries to keep Twoflower, the Disc’s first tourist, alive against some serious odds. The wafer-thin plot is besides the point, though, and the real meat is in the gentle parody of classic fantasy, which touches on Fritz Leiber, Anne McCaffrey and even H.P. Lovecraft. It’s all rather light and unchallenging, but there’s some genuinely funny bits among the Douglas-Adams-esque absurdity of it all. This one-liner is as funny, if not more so, than anything in Adams:

Let’s just say that if complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting ‘All gods are bastards’.

The Colour of Magic is far from Pratchett’s best, but it’s a perfectly good example of the Adams-esque funny-fantasy subgenre. There’s hints of how the series would develop. I was actually surprised by how good it was – it’s been a long time since I read it and I’d assumed it would be a chore in comparison to the more recent novels. It’s far from them in both style and skill, but it’s still a pleasant way to spend a few hours.

I got back from my trip to Amsterdam a couple of days ago. I had a great time there. I took lots of photos, many of them of ducks.

I was pretty excited to find recently that you can now purchase pure caffeine from sports supplements retailers. Caffeine’s cheap – it’s the by-product of decaffeination – and I like the idea of caffeinating my own drinks (rather than just drinking coke or whatever). So I bought some. The picture above shows 200mg of the stuff, or about 2 cups-of-coffee worth. It was nice added to some orange juice and lemonade.

The Velocity of Honey is like that. There’s no overarching theme here, no point that Ingram’s trying to make except maybe that science is full of interesting stuff and, well, here’s some of it in handy book form. It’s not serious science trying to do serious things, and it’s fascinating. The focus is a little narrow, but Ingram addresses this in his prologue: “I chose the topics based on the appeal of their science, which really meant their appeal for me. (For some unknown reason, there seems to be a lot of psychology and physics, with not much in between.)”

If you’re happy to let Ingram ramble at you on 24 different subjects this this’ll work well. I’ve read quite a lot of pop-sci and these kind of books have a tendency to cover the same ground – but I never noticed this in The Velocity of Honey. Ingram’s both original and interesting, which is quite an achievement. I had fun reading it.

Strange Telescopes is an examination of four Russian eccentrics. Actually, eccentric may be the wrong word. Kalder’s first subject, Vadim Mikhailov, who explores subterranean Moscow is clearly an eccentric, as is the film-maker obsessed with exorcism. But it’s hard to call Vissarion, a cult leader who claims to be a reincarnation of Jesus, merely eccentric. Kalder’s final study, Nikolai Sutyagin, who built a teetering wooden tower, seems the most normal of the lot. The common thread that Kalder finds is that all these men are engaged in the creation of their own realities. By accepting their realities for a while, Kalder is able to examine how it works.

It’s fascinating. Pretty much all the criticisms I leveled at Cosmonaut are fixed in Strange Telescopes. It’s a very good book and Kalder’s style is dry, witty, refreshingly dark and cynical. The pacing is problematic – Kalder’s apt to ramble around his subject for a while. The excorcist chapters dragged a bit for me. For the most part though, your patience is rewarded.

In a way he reminds me of the comedian Bill Hicks, who also used savage invective to communicate a righteous anger and made it funny. Like Hicks, Brooker has a fine line in knob (and arse) gags. He’s at his best when he’s looking on at something in horror.

Not everyone will appreciate what Brooker does, but if you like this sort of thing, then what Brooker does is some of the best of that sort of thing you’re likely to find. And it does bring memories of awful TV shows flooding back.